Free Mitla Pass by Leon Uris

cottage and, as we say in the trade, needed a bit of work by a handyman. But dammit, it had a spacious yard with a big madrona tree and a front porch meant for a swing and the living room had a fireplace and there were really nice schools within walking distance and ... the price was right.
    “Seven thousand four hundred dollars,” Mr. Perkins said, consulting his little book. Gulp!
    “How much down?”
    “This little beauty has a full G.I. loan. Nothing down and about a hundred bucks closing costs.”
    “How much are the monthly payments?”
    “On a 4 percent loan it comes to ... let’s see. Forty-one dollars and six cents a month, principal, interest, and insurance.”
    Our hearts were in our throats. We had a hundred and four dollars in the bank.
    What mistakes Gideon didn’t make as a carpenter, he made as a gardener, a painter, a plumber, and a bricklayer. But we attacked our little witch’s cottage until my belly got in the way, and by the time Penelope was born we had a warm, cozy, tiny piece of the world with a garden filled with roses.
    G IDEON HATED his job. I mean, he hated it with a passion. Home delivery in newspaper parlance conjures up a nice, clean-cut, all-American image of yapping dogs and picket fences and smiles on the faces of satisfied subscribers. Why, some of our presidents were newspaper carriers, the classic apple-pie road from rags to riches.
    It was a shit job.
    There was an ugly circulation war among the four San Francisco newspapers. The game was rigged so that the newspaper boys got screwed right, left, and center.
    District managers like Gideon came under unbearable pressure from an unsavory circulation department on the one side and the need to protect their paperboys on the other. His department floated on antacids and ulcer medication. Someone had a heart attack every six weeks.
    Gideon and some of the other district managers became just as sleazy fighting the paper and seeing to it their boys didn’t suffer losses. To make matters worse, the men elected Gideon as the union shop steward so he had every other district manager’s misery to contend with as well as his own.
    Winters were wet in San Francisco, but neither paperboys nor papers came waterproofed. The department became such a meat grinder that out of forty district managers, Gideon was third in seniority in a few short years. There was an inevitable moment when things reached a point where a wildcat walkout was being planned. This could mean bare-knuckle time, because the paper kept a lot of ex-fighters and toughs around to deal with such unrest.
    As a ringleader of the “agitators,” Gideon was transferred to a fully certified skid row, a district of poor blacks, poorer Hispanics, winos, prostitutes, several save-your-soul missions, V.D. clinics, and five candy-store robberies a night.
    “Hi, M OM !”
    “Hello, Val. I just set my bags down. Can you make it for cocktails at six in the Garden Court? Gideon can join us for dinner when he gets off work.”
    Mother and I had grown close, or at least as close as we were able. She adored Penny and Roxy, and Gideon never failed to bring a twinkle to her eye.
    Scotch is one of the unsung perks that comes with motherhood. Lovely stuff. Over drinks in the Garden Court, Mom and I made plans for the girls to spend a month with her in Coronado when school was out and I’d join them for the last couple of weeks.
    Mother was too elegant to come out with the forbidden subject, so I did.
    “He doesn’t write anymore. When we first moved to Mill Valley he did some short pieces. The job has just taken all the starch out of him. To say nothing of the rejections. Oh God, I hate rejections. They are death sentences. How many death sentences can a man take?”
    “Do you think he’s done with it forever?”
    “Right now I do. He’d have to find another job. Maybe if he could get something in Marin, he would start writing again. As for me, I’ve decided to go back to school and pick